Spend enough time hunting terrorists or wandering dystopian wastelands in online games and you are bound to come across players hurling xenophobic and racist taunts at each other, from Islamophobes in Europe to South Koreans and Japanese bickering over disputed islands.
Take the survival shooter game "H1Z1: King of the Kill," currently the third-most-popular on the world's biggest online game platform. Matches in Asia are sometimes interrupted by the Red Army, a band of Chinese players who have won praise from local media for championing in-game nationalism. One tactic involves cornering rivals and forcing them to pay tribute to the motherland by saying "China No. 1." Those who fail to comply are swiftly dispatched.
Their actions, along with those of peers from a panoply of countries and ethnicities, are gaining notoriety through countless online videos as the embodiment of a global online gaming phenomenon that has gathered momentum: the spread of xenophobia and racism.